New Sequel to Yoshi’s Island Coming to Nintendo 3DS

During today’s Nintendo Direct, President Satoru Iwata introduced a new installment in the Yoshi’s Island series that will be coming sometime in the future.

Yoshi’s Island: The third installment in the beloved franchise is making its way to Nintendo 3DS. Yoshi and Baby Mario are back with flutter jumps, ground pounds and egg throws, plus a host of new actions that use the unique features of Nintendo 3DS. More details about the game, as well as launch timing, will be announced in the future.

First of all, those Mega Eggs (that’s what I’m calling them for now) look awesome. Second, this looks like it could be fun, but no word on who is developing it yet, though. I only bring this up due to the Artoon-developed Yoshi’s Island DS, which was a fun game and had a great dynamic in the different babies you could carry (each with their own abilities, of course), but wasn’t quite up to the overall standard set by the original. Hopefully they’ll find a better use for the second screen, at least.

Speaking of multiple babies, fingers are crossed that they keep something like that.

One thing which bothers me is that the original Yoshi’s Island featured some sequences in which enemies and obstacles would come out of the background at the player in a 3D fashion. To my chagrin, New Super Mario Bros. 2— you know, the one for the Nintendo 3DS, didn’t really do anything to follow up on this, and nothing in the video indicates that this game will, either. One can only guess as to why.

Finally, a funny thing: Yoshi’s Island DS followed the storybook-like visual style of the original game, albeit with smoother updated graphics. But this game seems to follow another more closely, and one which wasn’t shown as being part of the series in the video, Yoshi’s Story. Though the graphics seem more in line with the underrated Nintendo 64 title (being upset at paying $50 or so for it on the Nintendo 64 is understandable, but for $10 on the Virtual Console, it’s a steal), the gameplay looks truer to the games actually bearing the “Island” name.